We’re heading into the final days with only three short months left in this year. To me, Halloween basically marks the end of the year. After that you have all the planning for Thanksgiving and Christmas which makes the days seem to fly by. It’s also the time when corporate offices bring all their projects to an end. People are planning to be out in November and December so hardly anything gets done until the start of the new year.

For the office I’m in we’re already pushing back projects to January and figuring out who’s going to be gone so we know what we can work on and what has to wait.

But as far as the meal prep business goes, how is it going to fair during this holiday season? It really didn’t seem to make a dent last year and most people opted to take care of the cooking themselves. There was some scaling back on how much was spent and how much travel was involved, but having a meal assembly store make the meal didn’t seem to be in the cards. Is there some indicator that says this end of year is going to be different?

The summer didn’t hold any mysteries and like the Great Pumpkin, the back to school rush never did materialize. We had a lot of high hopes and there was a lot of expectation, but in the end it just didn’t happen.

Now with the year winding down, will meal assembly be called on to help with the family cooking? Has there been enough advertising to entice people to come in? Are the prices low enough to convince people it’s cheaper to go to a meal prep store rather than do it themselves? Have there been enough initiatives to draw in a big enough crowd to keep owners from going broke at the end of the year? Have these new blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter ramblings grabbed the attention of enough new and lifelong customers?

In a bit of an ironic twist a lot of new articles and research shows that men take on the challenge of making the holiday meals. And if that’s true, they are the least likely to visit a meal prep store. If you combine those two it pretty much seems meal assembly is not only targeting the wrong audience at this time of year, but that audience isn’t all that interested in their goods and services. Third times a charm for not being invited to the party. Regardless of the season, meal assembly is always on the outside looking in.

Now seems like as good a time as any to start thinking about what to do in 2010. A new year awaits and in a lot of respects it’s not going to be a whole lot better than what we just went through.